Former Pfizer Scientists Put Down Biotech Roots

Jan. 09--Two former Pfizer Inc. scientists are trying to
accomplish nearly by themselves what $9 billion in research
spending by their former employer couldn’t buy last year --
the development of a new drug that wins regulatory approval.

And they’re working on their separate projects, inspired
by previous research they did at the company, at a newly renovated
building on Howard Street, practically a stone’s throw away
from Pfizer’s former world research headquarters off Pequot
Avenue.

The irony isn’t lost on Jim O’Malley, principal and
owner of Myometrics LLC, a biotech company that has set up its
laboratory in a building formerly owned by perennial city protester
Bill VonWinkle.

"It took fully a year to fit it out," said O’Malley, who
did much of the work on the building himself, starting in August
2009. "We’ve come a long way."

O’Malley’s firm, currently working on a drug to
promote bone growth after tooth extraction, has a five-year lease
on the building but is sharing space with an early-stage
cancer-research company called Sarataun, run by former Pfizer
scientist Farzan Rastinejad. Both men were laid off from the New
York-based pharmaceutical company that is in the process of
vacating its office complex in New London but still has a major
research site in Groton.

They currently work in the same building where VonWinkle, a key
figure in the eminent-domain controversy at Fort Trumbull that went
all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, once lodged a protest
against Pfizer’s role in the taking of homeowners’
property by famously painting the structure a lurid pink and
threatening to operate a strip club there just as the
company’s R&D headquarters opened.

O’Malley said the building was in a dire state by the time
he got hold of it, but its condition proved no hindrance to his
plans. He leases the building from the New London Development Corp.
for $1 a year after spending $60,000 of his own money on
renovations.

O’Malley said the state has several biotech incubators,
including one at Avery Point in Groton, but they were too far away
or didn’t suit his needs. "Avery Point is more appropriate
for marine science," he said. "They don’t have the facility
and licensing to do rodent research."

The local development group Southeastern Connecticut Enterprise
Region has hopes of launching an incubator that would attract other
former Pfizer scientists to start new companies. "The potential for
companies that have the sweat equity of Myometrics is a shining
example of what we have to do as we proceed to recover from an
economic downturn," said SeCTer’s executive director, John
Markowicz.

Annie Chambers, director of loan programs at SeCTer, said a few
potential new biotech companies are in the startup stage. But most,
she said, require working capital -- money that is hard to come by
in today’s banking world.

Money is still a problem for Myometrics, but it has managed to
land several federal grants, including $200,000 from the Department
of Defense. But state money has been in short supply,
O’Malley said. "It’s notable by its absence," he
said.

O’Malley has kept costs down by building his own lab,
which includes microscopes, centrifuges and a high-tech plate
reader for cell-biology studies, virtually all of it bought second
hand. Myometrics currently has a strategic alliance with a
medicinal chemistry firm in Ann Arbor, Mich., unaware of any local
company that can do the work.

O’Malley works with a part-time partner, Tom Owen, a
former Pfizer employee who lives in New Jersey. They are trying to
avoid venture capital, fearing that outside investors might
effectively shut them out of decisions and won’t share their
long-term goal of sustaining work in southeastern Connecticut.

"If this economy is going to start recovering, people who are
being laid off need to start working again," he said.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article is one of an occasional series
about local business innovators.

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